Pretty much every prominent metal musician has talked about forming a “supergroup” at some point, or at least collaborating with another high-profile artist. 99-percent of these talks never result in an album, but it is interesting to wonder what if? One of these projects almost included Mike Portnoy, Devin Townsend and Mikael Akerfeldt.

Three-fourths of prog metal’s Mt. Rushmore nearly formed a band about 10 years ago. According to Portnoy, talks took place around the time the drummer left Dream Theater:

Townsend, who is about to release his Empath album, responded by taking some of the blame for the band’s failure to launch:

Devin even described a writing session he had with the Opeth frontman in 2018:

It should be noted that Akerfelt and Steven Wilson nearly worked with Portnoy on their Storm Corrosion project. Portnoy was slated to play drums on the band’s 2012 self-titled album, but Akerfeldt and Wilson decided to ditch drums entirely.

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